Movies are generally made from a series of single, non-repetitive pictures which are viewed at a speed that provides the viewer with the appearance of continuous movement. These series of single pictures are positioned in adjacent picture frames, in sequential order, wherein adjacent pictures are substantially similar to each other and vary only slightly from each other. Usually, movies are created using movie cameras, which capture the actual movement of the object; with animated movies, a series of individual pictures or cells are created, usually by hand or computer, and assembled in sequential order where adjacent pictures of a scene are substantially similar to each other and vary only slightly. Standard film projection is 24 frames per second, American video standard NTSC is 30 f.p.s.
The appearance of continuous movement, using only two substantially similar pictures, has been accomplished in live performance by simultaneous projection of both images onto a screen, wherein one picture may be slightly off-set from the other picture as they appear on the screen, and by rotating a two-bladed propeller, wherein the propeller blades are set off from one another by 180 degrees, in front of and between the two projectors such that the two images are made to both alternate and overlap in their appearances, with both images in turn alternating with an interval of complete darkness onscreen when both projections are blocked by the spinning propeller. A viewer, using no special spectacles or visual aids, perceives a scene of limited action (with a degree of illusionary depth) that can be sustained indefinitely in any chosen direction: an evolving yet limited action appears to be happening continually without visible return-and-start-over repetition. Thus the viewer sees a visual illusion of an event impossible in actual life. Similarly, the manner in which things appear in depth are likely to be at odds, often extremely so, with the spatial character of the original photographed scene. Further, the character of movement and of depth has been made malleable in the hands of the projectionist during performance (so much so that such film-performance has been likened to a form of puppetry); the physical shifting of one of the two projections changes the visual relationship between them and thereby the character of the screen event produced. Similarly, small changes during performance in speed, placement and direction of propeller spin will cause radical changes in the visual event produced onscreen.
Other visual arts which relate to the present invention are the Pulfrich filter. For one program, titled “Bitemporal Vision: The Sea”, viewers were invited to place a Pulfrich light-reducing filter before one eye to both enhance and transform the already apparent depth character of the presentation.
Limited to presentation in live performance, such unique visual phenomena as described has been transient theater. Attempts to capture the phenomena by way of video-camera recording of the screen-image have been disappointingly compromised, so that—in over 25 years of such presentation (of so-called “Nervous System Film Performances”) no attempt has been made to commercialize such recordings.